20 Feb
2022
20 Feb
'22
1:09 p.m.
Just wanted to say this thread feels like a really central and helpful
group discussion, and it’s great to see this visioning around sudo,
hackerspaces, and their relation between stuff and humans.
A meeting to discuss more sounds good and will do my best to be available,
though I can’t yet confirm :/ Might it be possible to schedule a virtual
meeting, which might make it easier for folks given short notice?
I also wanted to acknowledge that there are some deep feelings around this
topic and so we should all make an extra hard effort to *not* take
different views personally and to remember that everyone probably shares
the same ultimate goal of how to make sudo more inviting and lively.
Imo it’s not so much about choosing between ‘empty yoga studio’ vs
‘hoarders paradise’ approaches as two opposing extremes, as much as
deciding on what a reasonable balance is? by perhaps defining some minimal
standards and routines.
Since standards decided upon can always be changed later, we might embrace
new approaches like the experiment that they are, without them feeling too
fraught or set in stone, a la the ‘RERO’ truism (release early, release
often). By the same token the earlier hacker truism that seems far less in
vogue these days, but I think particularly relevant to our approach here
about structuring space, is GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).
Best,
David
On Sun, Feb 20, 2022 at 07:36 Andrew R Gross via sudo-discuss <
sudo-discuss(a)sudoroom.org> wrote:
I would like to discuss this in real-time, ideally
face to face, for those
available. *Who can join me tomorrow (Monday) night at 8:30 pm?*
On Sat, Feb 19, 2022, 9:21 PM Eric O'Connor via sudo-discuss <
sudo-discuss(a)sudoroom.org> wrote:
There is a lot of talk about what policy changes
should be made, and what
Sudo *should not* be like. I think consensus works best when you go from
current situation > future situation > goals/motives > plans > execution.
So, having more or less established that the current situation is not
ideal, could we talk about what SudoRoom *should be* in the future? If
people can agree on that, I think the policies might be more clear.
To me, a hackerspace is useful because it has a bunch of great people and
tools and materials that I don’t have access to at my own home.
1) I can learn things from people, whether through casual interactions,
shared projects, and/or organized classes
2) Sharing tools and space, and acquiring materials in bulk means
everyone can have cheaper access overall
3) The community energy is inspiring and focusing. I want to do cool
things when I’m hanging with people who do cool things.
4-?) ??? add your thing here
In terms of motives, goals, fears, etc:
If I understand correctly, Jake is saying that curating tools and
materials is an important function of a Hackerspace — i.e. to enable (2) —
and that doing so requires significant effort.
Again, if I understand correctly, Yar, Andrew, and others are saying that
a cluttered space inhibits (1) and (3).
To add a fear of my own: materials (and to a lesser extent tools, which
are often consumable — drill bits, grinding wheels, etc.) cost money/time,
and are often not maintained/replaced when they’re shared.
It seems like the solution is to decide on a vision for what future
SudoRoom should be like. If you show up at SudoRoom on any given day, what
tools, materials, and people would you want to have access to? If we agree
on that, the plan should be easier to come up with, and people will be more
motivated to actually do it.
Eric
should
and that
for more
https://sudoroom.org/lists/postorius/lists/sudo-discuss.sudoroom.org/
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On Feb 19, 2022, at 15:19, Jake via sudo-discuss
<
sudo-discuss(a)sudoroom.org> wrote:
On Sat, 19 Feb 2022, Alexander Papazoglou wrote:
> I don't have any concrete suggestions other than finding a way to make
> stuff transit though sudoroom in a more orderly fashion. Like with
planned
events,
maybe in concert with other hackerspaces. But I'm probably just
echoing Joule's sentiments there.
I listed concrete suggestions: I said "come and get involved, spend time
understanding what we have and why, and make an impact."
> However, I think saying that people who don't like the space as it is just go
elsewhere is not good policy.
I understand that that's what people are interpreting from my email, is not what I meant. I tried to be clear but I
realize that it didn't
work.
I was saying that people who want an empty room should not try to make
sudoroom
into an empty room. There are other places for
that, and I support
that, but
like I said, sudoroom (to me) is a place where we
have tools and
materials in
addition to clear and clean workspace.
And I wish that people didn't interpret my email as telling people not
to
come
to the space, when I repeatedly and clearly said
that what we need is
for
people to come to the space and help make it
better.
> Firstly it's exclusionary whereas the spirit of the space is meant to
be
as
> inclusive as reasonably possible, and
secondly it selects for people
who have
> high clutter, disgust and hazard tolerance
thresholds. While I score
high on
> those metrics, I would like the space to be
open to people who don't,
and I
> think we would benefit from having members on
that side of the
"spectrum". We
> don't need to make it a yoga studio, but
it can be more like an
organized
shop,
can't it?
Alex
yes, I agree with you 100%. And I think that the way to get there is people to come to the space and contribute to
making it nicer. You and
I have
already been doing that and we will continue to
do it. I am planning
to do a
large e-waste run soon (in the next couple of
weeks) and I put work into
preparing that every tuesday night after people leave.
I understand that my previous email was pretty long and didn't succeed
in
getting through what I was trying to say.
I think that it would be really nice to have the space clean and
organized and
inviting, and the way we will do that is by
people coming into the
space and
cleaning and organizing it. There is no
substitute for that, and
people who
think that turning away donations (which have
supplied literally
everything in
sudoroom) are mistaken, and their suggestions
harm us and don't help
anything.
-jake
> On Sat, Feb 19, 2022 at 12:24 AM Jake via sudo-discuss <
sudo-discuss(a)sudoroom.org> wrote:
>
>> I see what I feel are pretty harsh condemnations of something I think
is
an
>> important part of
hackerspaces/makerspaces like our sudoroom.
>>
>> I've been hosting tuesday nights at sudoroom for a while now, and
trying to
>> get people back into coming to the space
and making use of it. We
make use
>> of a lot of different tools and supplies
in the space, to build
things,
>> repair things, and ideate. We also make
use of swaths of blank space
on the
>> tables.
>>
>> There is a spectrum of interest in the kind of hardware tools and
materials
>> we have in sudoroom. Some people are
very comfortable surrounded by
the
>> many kinds of electronic and other bits
we have, even though they're
far
>> from organized the way we would like them
to be.
>>
>> Other people have zero interest, and would be most at home in an
empty
room
>> with nothing but clean blank tables, good
even lighting, and no visual
>> clutter, like a nice yoga studio. Those people should definitely
have
that,
>> and I encourage them to start with the
disco room! It's almost there,
>> although the floor is a little too "busy" but it could be coated with
carpet
>> or something.
>>
>> It would be a mistake for the second kind of people to entirely fail
to
>> understand the value of the materials we
have, when the real issue is
that
>> we've faced a lack of human resources
to curate the space.
>>
>> materials, computers, monitors, TVBGones, monitors, soldering irons,
>> monitors, printers, broken laptops, power supplies, oscilloscopes, 3D
>> printers, and random stuff.
>>
>> Literally everything in sudoroom at this point has been a donation:
the
>> laser cutter, the tables, the light
fixtures over the north half of
the room
>> (I salvaged them from an abandoned
building, brought them and helped
install
>> them)
>>
>> yes, we get a lot of stuff that is not something we want to keep.
The
first
>> thing that comes to mind is
"printers" but a notable exception was
when
>> recently Hilary was able to score a
useful and working printer from
the main
>> tables that had been dropped off just a
few weeks earlier, by one of
>> Sudoroom's long-lost co-founders.
>>
>> What keeps Sudoroom from being unusable due to too much clutter, as
some
>> people have reasonably claimed about the
space recently? A lack of
>> contributing effort. Joule contributed tons of effort in the past,
and
>> hauled off lots of stuff (although they
are also the source of many
things
>> we still have)
>>
>> I have been putting hours every tuesday night (after others go home)
sorting
>> what we have, cleaning up, and preparing
to make a big e-waste run.
I've
>> also given away lots of
"donations" to people who would give them a
good
>> home, and i've even sold a few things
(all money goes to sudoroom)
and i'll
>> do it again.
>>
>> Today, perhaps thanks to my encouragement, Ian gathered our huge
excess
of
>> monitors and sorted them according to
which ones we should keep, and
the
>> rest of them will be donated to
https://techexchange.org which is an
>> organization that distributes computers to low-income families in
Oakland.
>> Why didn't our excess of monitors get
donated to them sooner?
Because it
>> requires human labor, and the pandemic
has had us basically closed
for two
>> years.
>>
>> If you want to help sudoroom be a better place; less cluttered, more
>> inviting, then come and get involved, spend time understanding what
we
have
>> and why, and make an impact. But please
don't be reactionary and
wish for a
>> blank and empty space, or whatever
minimalist vision you have in mind
that
>> doesn't align with the spirit of
material hacking and creativity that
the
> space
was founded on.
>
> -jake
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